Conservative firebrand and former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo hasn't had particularly kind words for President Barack Obama. Last October, for instance, he said that the president was a greater threat to the country than Al Qaeda.

And he's long questioned where the president was actually born. When Michelle Obama described Kenya as her husband's "home country" in a speech in 2008, the anti-immigrant Tancredo responded, "If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don't we just send him back?"

Not so much. In fact, Tancredo took the opportunity to gloat about his own prescience.

He issued a press release reminding readers of his comments a year ago on Alan Colmes' radio show regarding the birther controversy. Shortly after saying he had "absolutely no idea where [Obama] was born," Tancredo made these remarks about the whole fracas:

TANCREDO: Now they very well not want to show it because they want to propagate this whole thing that's going on about birthers. ... They may be doing it for that reason; I don't know why they don't want anyone to see it. ... They want it propagated because you know -

He repeated that claim in the statement issued Friday. "Obama has followed Mohammed, not the religious leader, but the boxer. President Obama has pulled off the perfect Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope," he said in the release, according to the Colorado Independent.

The idea, according to Tancredo, is that Obama withheld his birth certificate until now simply for the purpose of making Republicans look foolish. And the analogy to Ali seems to suggest a begrudging admiration of the strategy.

In his most recent foray into electoral politics, Tancredo ran for Colorado Governor last year, winning 37 percent of the vote on the American Constitution Party ticket against Gov. John Hickenlooper, far out-gaining Republican Dan Maes.